Guest Sara Cortise, who traveled from Switzerland to attend workshops during Esalen's golden anniversary, enjoys the sunshine and garden setting.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Guest Sara Cortise, who traveled from Switzerland to attend...

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A guest vists the meditation center, at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

A guest vists the meditation center, at Esalen Institute in Big...

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Guests are seen through a stained glass window at the Art Barn, a drop-in creativity hub.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Guests are seen through a stained glass window at the Art Barn, a...

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Esalen President Gordon Wheeler enjoys soaking in the hot spring baths conveniently located with a breathtaking view.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Esalen President Gordon Wheeler enjoys soaking in the hot spring...

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The morning harvest gathers produce for the 300 organic meals served daily at the Esalen Institute, with 80 percent of the food coming from its lush gardens.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

The morning harvest gathers produce for the 300 organic meals...

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Guests travel the path to and from the hot spring baths perched on the cliff where they look out onto a panorama of the Pacific.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Guests travel the path to and from the hot spring baths perched on...

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Kitchen workers use heirloom tomatoes from the Esalen gardens as they prepare focaccia bread for the evening meal.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Kitchen workers use heirloom tomatoes from the Esalen gardens as...

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Esalen Institute was founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, above.

Photo: Courtesy Of Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute was founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, above.

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Guests, volunteers and staff gather during lunch on the outdoor dining deck, at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Prema Brown, stops to admire the evening's sunset from the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Tuesday September 11, 2012. Brown traveled from Australia to attend the workshops there. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Prema Brown, stops to admire the evening's sunset from the cliffs...

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Massage tables fill the top level of the hot spring baths perched along the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Massage tables fill the top level of the hot spring baths perched...

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Esalen president, Gordon Wheeler, (top center) speaks at one of the many workshops taking place at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Monarch butterflies are found throughout the vegetables gardens at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Monarch butterflies are found throughout the vegetables gardens at...

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Garden Director, Shirley Ward, gathers a truck load of vegetables, including chard for the day's meals, harvested from the lush gardens at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Garden Director, Shirley Ward, gathers a truck load of vegetables,...

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Garden Director, Shirley Ward, gathers a truck load of vegetables, including chard, for the day's meals, harvested from the lush gardens on the property at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Garden Director, Shirley Ward, gathers a truck load of vegetables,...

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Guest, Ladan Zand walks among the vegetables grown on the grounds of Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Guest, Ladan Zand walks among the vegetables grown on the grounds...

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Jon Polansky, the lodge host, plays guitar during the lunch break on the outdoor dining deck, at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., on Wednesday September 12, 2012. The Institute is celebrating it's 50th anniversary this year.

When Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded the Esalen spiritual retreat on a remote cliff in Big Sur 50 years ago, they were dismissed as misfit mystics who did outlandish things like meditate and study Eastern philosophy.

But what they did, in fact, was launch a worldwide "human potential" movement that changed the way we think about almost everything, from science to psychology, to our own relationships, to what we eat, how we pray, and how we work.

Many of the Eastern philosophies and metaphysical concepts introduced to the West via Esalen have since become commonplace: yoga, meditation, mind-body connection, holistic medicine, permaculture, even massage.

Esalen, with views of crashing waves, soaring condors and migrating whales, has also been the ideal setting for diplomatic meetings between political leaders, and is credited with playing a major role in the melting of the Cold War.

"Esalen tried to carve out a way of being religious without being religious," said Jeffrey Kripal, head of religious studies at Rice University and author of "Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion."

"So today we have this phrase, 'I'm spiritual but not religious,' " Kripal said. "Now that's the largest religious demographic for people under 30. Esalen pioneered that concept in American culture."

Haven for intellectuals

As the iconic spiritual center gets ready to throw itself a golden anniversary party this week, Esalen remains a place of both emotional healing and naked hot spring bathing, as well as a haven for intellectuals to explore the outer limits of mainstream science and culture, delving into topics like precognition, psychic phenomena and life after death.

And it all started because Murphy and Price couldn't study what they wanted to in college.

"Back in 1955, my Stanford professors were in direct opposition to me, looking at me like I was crazy because I meditated," said Murphy, 82, who splits his time between Big Sur and Marin County. "Philosophy then was a branch of science, based in logical positivism. There was no character training - that was considered purview of the family or the church. It was such a long way from the Indian philosophies I was studying."

From the beginning, Murphy and Price wanted Esalen to be a gathering place for evidence accumulating from the furthest reaches of consciousness.

Cultural rebels

Their timing was fortuitous. Within a few years of opening Esalen, the Free Speech Movement, the Summer of Love and the antiwar movement happened, and all of a sudden throngs were trekking to Esalen to be with like-minded cultural rebels.

Even now, more than 12,000 people sign up for 600 Esalen workshops each year, in everything from sustainable business practices to hypnosis to "The Holy Fool: Crazy Wisdom From Van Gogh to Tina Fey and The Big Lebowski." The workshops range from $405 (a weekend stay, in a sleeping bag, on a conference room floor), to $4,565 (for a week's stay in a private room). Today, Esalen is a nonprofit with gross annual revenue of $14 million, half of which goes to pay 200 staffers and interns, according to Esalen Institute President Gordon Wheeler.

Cabins and yurts

Half the staff lives in spartan cabins or yurts nestled amid the lush vegetable gardens, art installations and a swimming pool. There is a preschool for children of staff members and retreat guests, a gym with windows facing the ocean, and carved benches tucked amid the trees and flowers for front-row seats to Imax-like sunsets. A patio with an outdoor fire pit overlooks the thermal baths, situated on a cliff above otters frolicking below.

Considered one of the most visually stunning places in the world, Big Sur is a magnet for painters, photographers, writers, many of whom use Esalen's Art Barn, a drop-in creativity hub stocked with paint, clay and paper.

However, karma sometimes comes with conflict. The uniquely communal workforce is still bruised over a recent management restructuring that led to the layoffs of two longtime employees, and an impassioned Esaleaks website where contributors point to changes like a new satellite Esalen office in Carmel (where there's reliable cell and Internet service), as evidence that Esalen has gone corporate.

Murphy and Wheeler understand the hurt feelings, yet insist there are no plans to change Esalen.

Several mornings a week, residents and visitors still gather in the Buddha garden to meditate at 7 a.m. before harvesting that day's kitchen grocery list. Eighty percent of the food that goes into the 300 organic meals served daily at Esalen comes from its gardens.

"We're so farm-to-table that most of our food doesn't even make it into a refrigerator before it goes on your plate," said Esalen executive chef Phillip Burrus.

Named after the Esselen Indians who lived on the property thousands of years ago, Esalen is so tranquil, it's hard to imagine the chaos from which it sprang.

In 1961, when friends Murphy and Price, both 31 and Stanford graduates, drove down to Murphy's family property with an idea to "start something," there was just a dilapidated hotel, an unruly guest list and a few hapless managers hired by Murphy's grandmother Bunny, who lived in Salinas.

Baez and her boyfriend

One area of the hotel was occupied by members of a Pentecostal church. A 19-year-old Joan Baez, her boyfriend and her boyfriend's sister were there, too, and had taken over the front lawn to build a trimaran. Henry Miller was a regular bather, as was his former lover, Anaïs Nin. On weekends, gay men from San Francisco descended on the baths, and, patrolling it all with several guns, a few of them semiautomatic, was the "caretaker," later to become gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

Still, Bunny refused to turn over the reins, afraid her mystic grandson would "give the hotel to the Hindus," Murphy said. But after Thompson, irritated by gay romping in the baths, got into a fistfight that ended with the bathers almost tossing Thompson from the cliff, Murphy's father, a lawyer, persuaded Bunny it was time for her grandson to take over.

With the property under their control, Murphy and Price began creating a restorative retreat for alternative thinkers like themselves who had been pushed to society's margins.

Discouraged by academia

Both men were discouraged by academia and had abandoned graduate study programs - Price at Harvard and Murphy at Stanford. But they were both taken by their Stanford undergraduate professor, Frederic Spiegelberg, whose "religion of no religion" teachings were based on those of 19th century Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, who in turn influenced Gandhi.

Spiegelberg's class inspired Murphy to study for 16 months at Aurobindo's ashram in India. Price's parents, worried that their son's mystical pursuits were a sign of mental illness, had him institutionalized and subjected to electroshock. He later said he survived the ordeal through meditation. (Price died in 1985 after a hiking accident in the Santa Lucia wilderness near Esalen.)

Price and Murphy would base their new Big Sur center on Aurobindo's central tenet: that the founding kernel of the universe comes from consciousness, and that consciousness is always evolving. They wanted to unite mind and body, religion and science, Eastern and Western thought - subjects traditionally separate in American culture - in healing practices that focused on consciousness.

"It was groundbreaking, this idea of a place to ground the psyche," author Jeffrey Kripal said. "In the '5os and '60s, you didn't deal with your emotions. It just wasn't part of the culture."

After hearing Aldous Huxley lecture that humans use just 10 percent of their brains, both men also wanted to spend the rest of their lives trying to tap into that remaining 90 percent.

Esalen opened to the public in September 1962 with a seminar, "Expanding Vision," devoted to parapsychology. Folk festivals featuring Baez, Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins followed. Timothy Leary led seminars on mind-altering drugs. Ansel Adams gave a talk on the photography of Edward Weston.

Gestalt therapy founder Fritz Perls took up residence, and became famous for putting volunteers in his "hot seat" and picking apart their defense mechanisms, or asking them to speak with people who had appeared in their dreams.

Beatle drops by

Within six years, George Harrison flew in by helicopter to listen to Indian musician Ravi Shankar play the sitar.

"It was a bit like Burning Man," Murphy said. "Before we knew it, a movement was under way."

More than 200 newspaper and magazine articles about Esalen appeared between 1968 and 1975, most focusing on the nudity, the drugs and the group therapy. Esalen was spoofed in the 1969 Academy Award-winning comedy "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," about a couple who return from a spiritual retreat and try to bring the concept of free love to their regular lives.

Nevertheless, Esalen was emerging as an intellectual center, winning grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and the National Institutes of Health to study mind-body science, nutrition, education and foreign policy.

As Esalen matured, Murphy and his wife, Dulce, became interested in political psychology, and beginning in 1980 hosted conferences on easing Soviet-American Cold War relations. Astronaut Rusty Schweickart was inspired by Esalen to create the Association of Space Explorers, which hosted the first ever meetings between American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, held in Europe.

In 1989, Esalen hosted Russian politician Boris Yeltsin on his first trip to the United States before he became president, and arranged meetings for him with President George H.W. Bush at the White House and Ronald Reagan while the former president was recuperating from surgery in Minnesota. According to Yeltsin's biographers Leon Ahrens and Timothy Colton, the trip catalyzed Yeltsin's decision to end Communist rule.

Today there are two Esalens - the personal retreat for mind-body healing, and the think tank where academics push the boundaries of science and psychology.

As part of the latter, in 1998 Murphy created the Esalen Center For Theory and Research, a global network of researchers, scientists and academics to pursue the scientifically unexplainable: near-death experiences, supernormal performance in sport, extra-sensory perception. He launched a series of annual conferences to explore the possibility that the mind is not limited by the physical body's demise.

'It's all about experience'

"In academia, what matters most is publication in journals and citations, but at Esalen it's all about experience," said English biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who led a September workshop at Esalen that drew from his latest book, "Science Set Free," in which he uses scientific questioning to debunk 10 commonly held scientific assumptions, such as that the mind is located inside the brain.

"A majority of the time a person can tell if someone is staring at them from behind," he said. "Just as electricity or magnets have fields, our bodies and minds and brains do, too."

Sheldrake and his wife, Jill Purce, make annual pilgrimages to Esalen.

"There's something magical about being on the edge of the country, at a spiritual place where three waters meet - the mineral, the freshwater and the sea," said Purce, who leads workshops in healing using sound and chanting.

"The water spirits are here at Esalen. There's nowhere else in the world like it."